Xenonauts is a strategy game in which you control a multi-national military organisation defending a Cold War-era Earth from alien invasion, using small squads of persistent soldiers to eliminate the extraterrestrials and recover their technology in turn-based ground combat. A detailed strategic lay...
Xenonauts is a strategy game in which you control a multi-national military organisation defending a Cold War-era Earth from alien invasion, using small squads of persistent soldiers to eliminate the extraterrestrials and recover their technology in turn-based ground combat. A detailed strategic layer allows you to co-ordinate the defence of the planet, using your interceptors to shoot down UFOs and researching captured artefacts to learn about your foes and unlock new combat equipment to use on your missions.
Xenonauts is a spiritual successor to the classic X-Com strategy games from the 1990s. We aim to improve the graphics, add new content and streamline the interface whilst still retaining all of the key mechanics of the original games. Devoted fans should love this game, but we're also keen to introduce the joys of old-school grand strategy to a whole new generation of players who might not otherwise experience it!
Ground Combat: Xenonauts delivers tense turn-based combat across realistic, varied and fully-destructible battlefields, against almost fifty different variants of enemy. Missions range from capturing crashed UFOs or alien bases to defending cities (or even Xenonaut facilities) against alien attack. You'll experience the chill of encountering a new alien for the first time and the joys of test-firing a new weapon for the first time. Deeply asymmetric combat keeps the battles interesting - after all, you're fighting intergalactic invaders with 1970's ballistic technology!
Persistent Soldiers: Soldiers in Xenonauts are persistent from mission to mission, improving their stats and gaining ranks with combat experience - but their deaths are always only a single bad move away. You will grow to care about the brave men and women under your command as they slowly grow from green rookies into hardened veterans, but that only makes it more painful when their heroic tale is cruelly cut short by a burst of plasma fire...
Research Tree: Xenonauts has an extensive research tree with almost a hundred projects to unlock, each with its own unique description and painted artwork. It slowly reveals the intentions and origins of the invaders, while also unlocking new battlefield equipment, aircraft and vehicles for you to use as you harness alien technology and turn it against them.
I really liked the Xcom game firaxis put together. It had smooth combat, good graphics, good risk/reward (losing team members happens a lot)...but yet it wasn't punishingly difficult. Sure, some missions were hell but at least, if you planned well, you could end up with little to no casualties.
This game ? Well it's basically the same concept but poorly executed. The game is very difficult and your whole crew will die over and over (a sniper won't hit an alien yet the aliens will oneshot him), the graphics are really poor and overall, you feel like you're watching stats line and a bland world map 80% of the time.
The design is really poor and as a result, the game really doesn't feel any fun. Maybe if you like hardcore difficulties, you will like it but then again, even if it wasn't as difficult, the game still wouldn't be much fun.
The music isn't memorable, the combat is glitched and poor; it has little story; and the ending, victorious image feels like a hollow reward. There's some copy-pasting going on in that ending picture, too. (Two of the men, on the left, have raised elbows which look identical.) It had many issues which made it annoying, and I didn't enjoy it.
The ground-combat was the most flawed. Reserving TU to do burst shots didn't work. Hiding behind cover was often pointless. Shots went more than half-way across the map for the aliens, and they had impeccable aim. Meanwhile, my battle-hardened soldiers had trouble shooting aliens at all. They'd often miss an alien that had no cover, and was only a few tiles away. Sometimes my soldiers would go berserk, and even miss their allies next to them. Morale was supposed to stop their mental breakdowns, but its depletion didn't show like health loss did. The morale bar always looked full. I even had one solider whose morale was 99+ at full: it'd show as full while he went under alien control, dropped his weapon and ran, panicked, or went berserk. What makes all of this especially bad is that ground combat is a major part of the game. Its issues become irritating over time.
Air combat was also problematic. Auto-resolving gets worse results than fighting the battles out. This could make sense since it forces the player to play. However, these air fights are repetitive, frequent, and dull. The temptation to auto-resolve was high, but a player would likely lose if this was done. For example, I could manually take down 3 heavy fighters with 2 interceptors and with ease, but auto-resolve showed that I had almost no chance to win. To progress well I had to constantly micromanage the planes. Furthermore, if a battle goes sour, you have to wait and watch while your planes head for the edge of the grid. You can't simply hit a button and cancel out. Even if there's no chance of the enemy catching your retreating planes, you have to watch it try.
A technically complex and potentially beautiful but cold and incredibly hard heir of the XCom series, from which it copies most of the concepts, mechanics and style.
Don't get me wrong, for some people it's probably an awesome game, going back to the time of the first XCom games with a strong original vibe. Unfortunately then the game turns deadly at random times, with the player not being able to do much to prevent it apparently.
I had the feeling i might have loved it, then when i started it I felt i would not, then in less than one hour i had it uninstalled. It really is more a simulator than a strategy game in a way it seems to become quickly repetitive.
Like i said, some might love it, but me I didn't.
Gets a 60/100 from me because i mostly see the potential for others, but for me it was a miss.
I start right away what frustrates me: The Ground Combat
Your soldiers are squishy and can't hit anything while the aliens snipe you from outside your viewing distance. You want to storm a UFO? Oh great, move your soldiers through a 2 tile wide kill corridor against aliens that can shoot through walls appearently - and don't think you can camp outside, as the enemy won't leave the ship.
But here is the absolute kicker: Psy attacks work across the whole map, so prepare to have half your squad in panic mode before meeting the first enemy on the map - Bonus points for having a mind controlled soldiers 3 turns in. Without the edit of a gamefile that basically disables this failure of a gamemechanic it's literally unplayable.
I want to like this game, I tried a lot of things to make it fun.... but nope, no fun to be found, you're better off getting ANY X-Com title instead
...it crashes often for me (more than a couple of years ago) and then I get asked to rate the game until I do. I can't recommend ironman because you can't autosave and then you lose everything in a crash. Five stars+ if it starts crashing less.
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